Even as an adult, I find that real animals look strange to me. I've seen so many cartoon images of skunks and giraffes and elephants in my life, and even though I know they're cartoons, when I do a google image search and photographs dominate the results, I usually find them quite alien.
Some subconscious part of my brain is totally convinced that a giraffe looks like this . . .
http://www.moho.biz/oskar-the-giraffe/
. . . and doesn't immediately recognize this . . .
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xRmReWpJeJE/T2QxTEZ95_I/AAAAAAAABw...
. . . as the same animal.
I find it excruciatingly odd people hate on large scale cow lots, but seemingly find the mass murder of small animals that live in the same place as grains to be "meh". More rabbits and other cuddly creatures die from combines than all of the evil things we do to cows in feed lots.
I've had to help out cows after they've prolapsed, and also had to help out other cows that have fought each other to near death, animals are not disney cartoons. But I've dated vegetarians and vegans (no offense to anyone there) that seem to have this unnatural viewpoint of our use of animals as food.
I see cartoon cows and can't help but think its similar to lolcats. So far removed from reality that we've anthropomorphized things to the point of ridiculousness. I'll be a bit blunt, after living around cows for 18 years of my life, I really don't have much sympathy for them. They're just as evil as humans are to each other, and they are such herd creatures it isn't funny. The bulls however always seemed to be less skittish, the females, they never acted even remotely rational or consistent. Bring calves into the picture and throw even that out the window. The bulls just fought and wanted to get into the females areas.
Just to counter your city experience a bit, not trying to say feed lots are a good way to mass produce meat, but I grew up not dealing with any of that. I have zero qualms eating a cow or chicken, but free range is loads better to eat than mass produced. I just see them as no different than wheat or other plants to be honest.
I didn't mean to be misleading. I agree with you; the strong opinion I developed was that those animals are clearly food. And that some of the excessive compassion spent on them would be better spent on people, who might actually appreciate it.
I grew up in the pacific northwest, surrounded by a lot of examples of Inuit art. The captions always said something like, "This one is an orca," and I always thought, "If you say so!"
But I think Mickey is even more distorted! I can easily imagine someone from another culture reacting that way to the claim that he was a mouse.
I don't have a problem recognizing real mice because I've interacted with them a lot. But animals for which my only frame of reference is cartoons, well . . . my expectations of the real animals can be downright embarrassing.
I'd imagine my mental models of them would fare better if I weren't surrounded by miles and miles of endless civilization.
But why would people without contact to "food animals" anthropomorphise them out of all things, not think of them as dumb food containers like plants? In the end, both end up shrink-wrapped in a supermarket. I know that my non-farmer, omnivore friends are basically saying this. Have I just picked friends that are more resistant to Disney movies than the general population? :)
